Welcome to Pets Live. Infamously the greatest Storm8 game ever :P.There’s a couple things that differentiate Pets Live from the other Storm8 games, that could mess up your gameplay if you don’t know about them.

When you start out, I recommend training the following pets: King, Tumbler, Hilo, and Torch. They offer a balance between attack and defense. Later on, when you choose a player style, you can adjust your pets accordingly. When doing so, I would recommend using this spreadsheet written by Supervolcano: http://immoforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2639 .

Allocate your first 10 SPs to defense. This will prevent anyone from farming you, which can be very bad at low levels as getting money is difficult when you start. After that, I would recommend adding as many ATM codes and recent player codes as you can. You’re going to need people in your crew later on, so you might as well go ahead and build up now.

Log in as much as you can, and do missions for cash. My advice is to keep going through missions until you reach rank 3 for that tab, then go on to the next. You get 1 SP for every time you master a mission, as well as a total of 12 SPs for completing a whole tab.

Unfortunately, the money provided from missions isn’t so great. To get more, you’re going to need to farm. Once you have those SPs invested in defense, go ahead and rank your ammo up to 10. I’ll discuss battling and farming techniques a little bit later.

You’ll start out with 3 habitats unlocked. I would save up enough money to buy a couple of the second one (Don’t bother with the first… It’s a waste of $$). Then, start investing in the 3rd habitat unlocked until you’ve maxed the number of those (15). Until this point, you’ll find that you’ll be low on cash most of the time. Don’t worry though. That’ll soon change.

This section of the guide will deal with battle. Battle in Pets will seem confusing at first, but is no more complex than battle in the other games. When you battle, you’ll use four pets of your choice. Each of these Pets will use all available abilities you’ve trained as well.

There’s three main things you need to know about battle in Pets:

First: About your pets… You should train four different pets, each of a different element. When in battle, you’ll find that certain elements will be stronger or weaker against different ones. The battle flow goes like this:

Fire beats Air. Air beats Earth. Earth beats water. Water beats fire.

As soon as you’re given the ability to choose your battle order (level 10 I think). Choose this order: Water, Earth, Wind, Fire.

This order was created to be the exact opposite of the standard player’s, so you’ll beat them more often when attacking or defending.

Maybe you disagree with how that works out, but that’s how Storm8 has it. You should never have 2 pets of the same element that you’re training, as it makes you overly susceptible to attackers. D.

Also, NEVER slack off on ranking up Pets when you level. You’ll just look weak and get farm

Second: About your abilities… At first, it might seem that abilities have little impact on battle because their numbers will look small. As you train them (Your max rank for abilities will be 20 for quite a while..), their stats will increase, and you’ll start to see the benefit of them.

As with your pets, rank them up to the max whenever you’re given the opportunity

Third … About attacking technique: My favored attacking technique in Pets is known as farming. In other games, farming is very risky because people get mad. Fortunately, due to the massive amount of little five year olds playing this game, you won’t face very much retribution for farming a player (usually). Before attacking, look at your opponent’s pets. Only attack opponents whose Pets order is the weakest against your order. Once you’ve found this kind of player, attack away.

In response to Ronin's comment regarding how I determined the best order... As a lower level player, I did a lot of looking, and saw that around 85% of players kept their first pet (Torch, a fire pet) as their top one.. Another 5% trained a different fire pet (usually spark or flint).

I then looked at their profiles, and saw the most used order (which also followed the order you get them in...), and selected an order that would combat them.

I feel the need to add that the order of your elements is Extremely important. I recently had some problems with a farmer who was a couple levels lower than me, but who had more crew and higher ranked pets than me. I then adjusted my pets to be the most effective against his. Here's the stats I got from that:

Well, that's a pretty big difference... Shows that the elements are an extremely strong factor.. His pets were ranked 25 levels over me, yet I was still winning most of his battles... He's ranked up some since he last attacked me (I bet he actually bought points for this game...), so we'll see what happens next.

Just to make sure that I am correct, I am at level 12 for this account so I will keep an eye out for when I can choose my battle order. Also when I reached level 16, dr will comes up and asks me if I wanted to learn about the best way to set up my pets and then allowed me to select my battle order.

LOL it is funny that nobody complains if i farm them on Pets Live. All they do is post their code on my wall saying they want to be my allie. One more thing i get coments on my wall saying that they sooo love my ingame name.

i play by the same "rules" for all games. except in this game my rules are posted on my wall. and i love that i get called all sorts of names and get asked why i DL'd somebody, when it's only 1 or 2 post away from theirs. reading FAIL!

i hate this game! getting ready to reset it for the third time (4 characters total) and i took all my money out of the bank, invested skill points in health and activated my weakest animals. I have been randomly inviting people to attack me for wins and cash and now all the sudden, everyone is NOT attacking for a change. my payouts are awesome! like 12 grand a pop. but i have had 7 mil floating for 3 days now and it has only dipped below into 6.999 teritory one time. c'mon, guys!!!! beat me up!!!! lol

When dismissing a pet, what happens? Meaning what happens to the status of the pet...like is it reset to level 1 or is deleted from your team. Just curious if you are able to keep or get the pet again.

@st8jump Only those pets that have been ranked up to lvl20 can be released. Lower lvl pets cannot be released. When you release a pet it is gone until u capture it again by doing missions (when you release the first pet u selected when starting the game it resets to lvl 1 but will remain with you). When you release a pet you do not get any money back. The money u invested in that pet is gone.

not that it will ever happen, but s8 really needs to redo the releasing of pets. at my lvl it costs about 20 million to upgrade just one pet up to my lvl. they should give you at least half of it back. the only thing gained from releasing a pet as it stands now is more income per hour since you are no longer paying upkeep on the released pet. which is a wash since most players release a pet just to replace it with a different one.

I fully overlooked this bit of knowledge and did not know anything about releasing a pet......I just level them all up as them become unlocked.....Because of the money just sitting there......I'm sure that will change as I level a bit more.....

as an ATM in this game, i lvl quite a few of my pets up to 19, the lvl before they start to acrue upkeep. shortly before event time i lvl the ones i'm using for the event, release and then go capture them again at lvl 1. pretty soon i won't have to do this anyone, the rank 4 introduction caused most of my low lvl pets to lvl against my will. :(

DarkLords....Your welcome......When I first read through the threads.......It was a bit confusing....and then I realized that there was a bit of erroneous info also......Had to weed out.....Get the correct info......

yeah, i see a lot posting, just for the sake of posting, i think. but if you read through, a lot of threads you'll see that there is a "core" group that posts often with the intent of actually helping other players and not misleading them.

You are right! Because of this competition to win prizes by participating in the site, I see repeated messages for the user to add more points. Unfortunately, or fortunately for us, there are some ones who seek help and write good advices. Thank you both TSIPR and Sith.